Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The Guatemalan 2013 genocide trial, where ex-President Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted, and the Sepur Zarco trial held in February of 2016 brought to focus the sexual violence suffered by Maya women at a massive scale during the over-three-decades long civil conflict. In this article, the instances of sexual violence and sexual slavery suffered by —at least—fifteen Q’eqchi’ women between 1982 and 1988 are addressed in parallel to a dimension of the Sepur Zarco trial which has been for the most part overlooked: the situation of domestic slavery that was also inflicted on the Maya women survivors. Specifically, I suggest that the process of devaluation of indigenous women’s reproductive work (intensified to the extreme during the Maya genocide) needs to be historically understood in relation to the capitalist modernization projects put into motion by Central American liberal elites during the last decades of the 19th century. The liberal modernization projects relied upon two opposing —and heavily racialized— concepts of work: the notion of “productive work” and the notion of “unproductive work.” These notions eventually found their way into the Central American households and actively contributed to the creation of a renovated hierarchical order structured around forms of domestic work considered to be “productive” (i.e., the domestic work performed by lettered and modernized housewives) and other forms of work considered “unproductive” (that is, the work performed by indigenous domestic servants). Ultimately, these imaginaries of inequality that thrived within the households of the isthmus have survived until today, when ample sectors of the population still equate “indigenous women” with “domestic servants,” and when different forms of devaluation, exploitation, and other forms of abuse are inflicted upon local domestic workers with total impunity.  

Since at least 2011, Central American migrants and their allies in Mexico have staged caravans, combining humanitarian accompaniment with protest, protecting individuals from harm while demanding their rights be respected while in Mexican territory. In 2018 and 2019, this phenomenon took a new dimension, as tens of thousands of mostly Honduran migrants organized themselves into caravans, starting from Central America for the first time. As two anthropologists who have been present in many caravans over the last decade, we explore the nature of caravans as protest, while identifying the limitations to that process. We focus on the unapologetic hypervisibility of the caravan and the demand to not only be allowed to pass through Mexican territory but to be treated with dignity. “Lady frijol” became the symbol of this demand, rejecting donated food, bullied as “ungrateful” by Mexican media, and then celebrated when she turned up in the United States. We argue that this kind of in-your-face demand of a right to exist as one wishes and move through space without seeking permission has coalesced in the form of the migrant caravan and, in doing so, had real impact on public discourse and politics. We also recognize, however, that the short-term impacts are limited and even negative, as caravaneros face repression and criminalization, deportation of Central Americans continues unabated, and borders are being further militarized as a response. Still, in the face of this, Hondurans continue to migrate, proudly defiant, in caravans.

This essay narrates the story of Rosa Pérez Pérez, the first president woman in the history of Chenalhó, one of the Tzotzil-Maya township in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. First of all her story is depicted as a drama in four acts: her rising to power in democratic elections in July 2015, her destitution in May 2015 under the pressures of her political contenders, her return to power in August of 2016, and finally, the last period of her goverment between November 2017 and October 2018, until the takeover of the presidency by Abraham Cruz Gómez. Second of all, several theoretical concepts, suitable for an analysis of the case, are considered. Two different theoretical and methodological perspectives are distinguished: The THEYWorld and the IWorld. While the former is defined in terms of the impersonal rules which govern social practices, the later express the individual perspectives internalized in the individuals involved in the of everyday life. Two testimonies are presented: one of Moisés Pérez the former judge in the government of Rosa Pérez Pérez, and the other of Samuel Pérez, the cousin of Moises. While the former defends Rosa’s right to be on charge as a legitimate president of Chenalhó, the later denies it. It is concluded, that the conflict in Chenalho’ can be explained by recurring to the three explicative models: the gender-based model, the economical/ political model and the personalist model. According to the first and the second one, the story of Rosa Pérez Pérez makes visible a clash between the traditional patriarchal social order and its modern counterpart, based officially on gender equality-principle. Finally, it is argued that the third model, a personalist one, is better equipped to explain social clashes in Chenalhó: it assumes that the social change is a result of the interplay between the TheyWorld of impersonal rules of the games and the IWorld of personal interventions into those rules. It is the interplay between two worlds that opens the possibility of social change.

In this article, I analyze the relationship between the political actions of families of Honduran migrants victims of extreme violence in Mexico and the forms of joint and visible mobilization in the form of caravans that we have known since October 2018. For this porpuse, I gather the impressions about the displacemnt of Honduran migrants in the form of caravan that relatives of dissapeared and executed migrants in their way through México, before this type of mobilization, happened. Highlighting their experience as relatives of victims, I recover the imaginary they have built on “the road through Mexico,” and I pay special attention to the role they give to armed groups linked to drug trafficking and migration policies in the violence against migrants. From this I investigate the way in which they have understood the mobilization in “caravans” as a strategy that can reduce the risks in Mexico but also as a political action to the extent that it points to the current migration management. Also, I analyze the link between these families and the people of the caravan based on the relationship between their claims for truth and justice and the dignified transit of migrants.

This ethnography represents an exercise of the “socio-anthropology of emergencies”. It draws on the first results of an ongoing investigation into migrant subjectivities and self-organization, which are, for us, the ultimate meaning of the caravans that originated in Central America and crossed Mexico in the fall of 2018 and until the spring of 2019. We use the methodological tool of life histories in order to illuminate the emerging subjectivities and political agency produced and sustained by the caravans; more specifically, we share young Hondurans’ biographies involving their unsuccessful attempts to reach the United States, as well as some of the strategies to preserve their own life or the one of their families. We include the biographies of four young people we met when, as researchers of asylum and migrant struggles, we took part of the humanitarian bridge that sheltered the caravans transiting through Mexico City. Drawing over these life histories, we analyze processes of collective becoming, as well as the individual strategies of those displaced by poverty or violence who, trapped in transience (Fernández, 2017), attempt to build a viable life in this “bottleneck country” (Varela, 2019). Through these cases, we seek to reflect on contemporary Mexico and its ways of managing transmigration, as well as the way in which it has become a “hosting country”.

From our reflections based on participant observation and accompaniment of migrant caravans from southern Mexico northward, this work focuses on highlighting the different meanings of caravans in the current migratory era. We highlight how the collective action and, particularly, the political collective bodiment in movement1 (acuerpamiento) of the caravans is based on necessity and survival, a context that encourages, in an emergent, temporary and sometimes contradictory way, the participants’ practices of political subjectivation. We explore the tendencies of unity and fragmentation, the oft-criticized form of decision-making, the way of carrying onward despite the obstacles, the rejection of the “captive refugee” regime promoted by the Mexican government as well as by some civil society organizations, and how the appropriation of asylum as a tool paradoxically re-signifies the role of victims to which many have sought to limit migrants.

For the traditional Mexican asylum policy, the 1970s proved significant by confrontation with other realities. They were also significant because of the challenges that diplomacy had to overcome with the existing instrument (Convention on Diplomatic Asylum of 1954). They were also significant because of the various perceptions of risk of the protection applicants, as well as for the particular interests of the Mexican State regarding its peers in Southern Latin America. An approach to the experiences of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay makes it possible to observe considerations and variables presented to the same asylum State, Mexico, from political realities that appeared similar and simultaneous but that were not so according to the facts.From writing the history of its distinctive aspects, the article observes some core issues of the norm regulated in 1954. From this observation, it will be possible to determine ways of interpretation and its application. This journey will lead to a possible explanation of the tensions between the norm and the facts of the asylum, highlighting that the former did not fit the circumstances in which it was applied. The final reflection is potentially useful in the light of a new and diverse present, where protagonists in the decision making are located, both in the (re)elaboration of the inter-American legal instruments as in the national ones. But these experiences should not be ignored in the formation of the diplomatic corps of the various chancelleries.

This article analyses three representations of migratory phenomena that shape the seemingly fixed and immobile cornerstones of Italian identity. The research is informed by the current reflection on Italian postcolonial condition. Each case study is introduced by a brief historical contextualization. The first case includes the analysis of a vignette devoted to Italian emigrants in the United States and published in the New Orleans newspaper The Mascot (1888). The second consists of the oral history of Aida, a migrant woman, who moved from a village in Southern Italy to Rome after the Second World War. Finally, this paper examines some regimes of representation of Mario Balotelli, Italian soccer player of African descent who is a member of the national team as well (Soccer World Cup 2014). Hence, this article aims to give a contribution to the field of cultural studies.

In this article, first we stress how the regional dress constitutes one of the pillars of the Yucatecan identity, a minor identity, built upon the contrast and opposition to a major identity, the mexican one. In the second part we discuss the advantages and limitations of the terms handcraft and ethno-commodity to better characterize the Yucatecan regional dress. Finally, we propose that the different roles taken by the male and female versions of the regional dress constitute a direct reference respectively, to modernity and tradition.